The Flowers-Fields platform has evolved into a brand new robot species which is now pursuing its development among the exhibition Mathématiques – Un dépaysement soudain (Mathematics – A Beautiful elsewhere) at Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain. The platform is named Ergo-Robots for this exhibition, in relation to Micha Gromov’s Ergo-systems, whose collaboration with Pierre-Yves Oudeyer initiated the project.

The robots have gained a new egg-shaped living environment and new faces, both designed by David Lynch and his team. We also have been working hard to design a new set of moods and behaviors that also deeply transformed the platform appearance.

We strongly encourage those of you spending some time in Paris until March to come to Fondation Cartier, and have a look and the opportunity to interact with Ergo-Robot platform !

More information and pictures can be found on our website dedicated page and some nice video of the installation will soon be available…

The Flowers team.

The first joint edition of the ICDL-EpiRob conferences just ended in Frankfurt. The conference itself was very exciting, and led to many stimulating discussions and exchange for those of us attending.

The Flowers team presented three papers:

• Mai’s talk on Bootstrapping intrinsically motivated learning with human demonstration,
• Manuel and Thomas’ poster on The Interaction of maturational constraints and intrinsic motivations in active motor development,
• and Adrien’s poster on Simultaneous acquisition of task and feedback model.

Four of us were also presenting posters on our ongoing work:

• Imitating operations on internal cognitive structures for language acquisition, by Thomas,
• Modeling maturational constraints for learning biped humanoid locomotion, by Matthieu,
• Intrinsically motivated goal space creation for autonomous goal-directed exploration in high-dimension  unbounded sensorimotor spaces, by Fabien,
• Unsupervised learning of simultaneous motor primitives through imitation, by Olivier.

We are very proud of Mai whose paper just finished second for the best student paper.

We have returned from the conference with new ideas and perspectives, and are looking forward to next edition of the conference.

InnoRobo was established as a chance for international players in the service robotics industry to meet and share new ideas about robotics and their future. There were over 100 robots exhibited of which 30 were shown for the first time in Europe.

Our newest version of FlowersFields proved quite a success. The flowers interactive modes were very well received, as volunteers to stand in front of the flowers and wave their arms around madly never ceased. Their improved motion and ascetic appearance did credit to the hard work the team put in before the exhibition.

Acroban was quite the celebrity and performed well in front of a continuous captive audience. We can only hope that popularity and fame has not gone to his head….

There was a very high quality of attendees with representatives from ALDEBARAN with their army of Nao robots; Gostai and their telepresence robots Jazz; and the ECCERobot, a result of collaboration between research centres and Robot Studio, which focuses on mimicking the human form. For the Flowers team it was a very valuable experience. Important contacts were made with both business and research.

InnoRobo was well covered, and our robots got a lot of publicity. For those who are interested in seeing our robots in the media, here are a few interesting links:

• TV Appearances
  • TF1: Des robots à l’image de l’homme
  • JTech45: iPad 2, 3DS, salon Innorobo
• Radio
  • France Info: Acroban, le robot humanoide
• Newpaper
  • Le Point: La robotique s’empare des sciences humaines

The key feature of the new version is the Dynamixel RX-28 and RX-64 motors that now replace the previous AX-12 for improved robustness, smoothness and compliance.

Focus has been put on general robustness and on the integration of new sensors in order to develop a wider range of interactions with the lamps.

A brand new lamp shade color scheme also gives them  a refreshing look, already suggesting life and energy.

The new platform will be part of our exposition at the European INNO-ROBOT summit, on the 23, 24 and 25 of March 2011 in Lyon, France. We are looking forward to meeting you there, and for the most impatient ones, here are some pictures of our work in progress.

The Acroban project was presented by Olivier LY at the French/German Workshop Humanoid & Legged Robots in Paris, the 14 & 15 february 2011.

The workshop was very interesting, a lot of impressive robots and controls were presented.

Because of their research subjects similar to ours, we particularly enjoyed the presentation of A.Seyfarth from the Lauflabor about how leg compliance shapes the way we moves. And the work of O.von Stryk from the SIM TU Darmstadt about compliant actuation and control of bio-inspired Humanoid Robot Motion.

Flowers team is proud to announce its participation to the first INNO-ROBOT  summit on service robot innovation, which will happen in Lyon on 23, 24 and 25 of March 2011.

More information is available at http://www.innorobo.com/wordpress/ and http://www.innorobo.com/wordpress/inria-flowers.

We hope we will see you there !

Flowers Team

Find more about our Flowers Fields installation, by watching  the video on our YouTube channel or on the team web site.

We hope you will enjoy the content of this blog. You can visit our web site http://flowers.inria.fr.

The FLOWERS team.